ACADEMIA

LineRate Systems announces the availability of LineRate Proxy, the industry's highest performing network software that delivers L4-7 network services without the need for expensive network appliance hardware. LineRate Proxy is the first product in a family of software defined network services. SDNS is a flexible architecture that provides automated, programmatic deployment, management and customization of network services using only software.

By replacing expensive, proprietary hardware appliances with SDNS running on commodity x86 servers, customers benefit from flexible on-demand deployment, automated management and scaling, and the elimination of up-front capital expenditures. This is made possible by LROS, LineRate's patent-pending network operating system that unlocks the potential of today's x86 CPUs to deliver network performance that rivals high-end purpose-built hardware. LineRate Proxy combines LROS with a suite of L4-7 services applications to provide a complete solution.

Photobucket, a leader in online photo sharing, uses LineRate Proxy in its production network to ensure application availability, performance and security. Photobucket was able to eliminate the need to purchase additional hardware appliances without sacrificing any performance. In addition, LineRate's guaranteed performance licensing model simplified Photobucket's operations and slashed its costs. "LineRate scales to fit my needs and their licensing model lets me add capacity the same way I buy bandwidth - I buy the gigabits I need when I need them. With the traditional hardware model there's a big cash expenditure upfront, and if you forecast wrong, you've overbought," says Jim Goss, VP of Operations at Photobucket.

LineRate reduces costs in three ways: First, expensive hardware purchases are eliminated and replaced with low-cost servers; second, LineRate's scale-out architecture scales on demand from gigabits to terabits of performance so that there is never a reason to fork-lift upgrade. Finally, LineRate's guaranteed performance subscription licensing ensures that customers only pay for what they need and actually get what they pay for. This takes the risk out of capacity planning. "I think less about the future now because I know I can respond quickly when there's a change," says Goss.

As the company's first SDNS product, LineRate Proxy is a configurable suite of full-proxy L4-7 network services that offer traffic management, security and performance visibility for web-based applications. These services are used for functions such as server load balancing, intelligent content switching, SSL offload, access control, performance monitoring and IPv4/v6 translation. The system is fully configured and managed via its REST API. This enables easy integration and full automation from a customer's existing orchestration or management platform.

"The promise of SDNS hinges on the development of network software that can perform at the speed of hardware - we are the tipping point," says LineRate CEO Steve Georgis. "The transition from static hardware to flexible software will simplify the way that systems are deployed, scaled, customized and managed. For service providers who operate at web scale, this will result in tremendous savings in operations, capital equipment and time."

LineRate Proxy v1.5 is available now directly from LineRate Systems.